Strange and Wondrous: Prints of India from the Robert J. Del Bontà Collection

Opens October 19
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

As global travel boomed from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, Europeans and Americans became increasingly fascinated with Indian culture. Merchants, soldiers, and missionaries documented their visits to India and other foreign lands in illustrated accounts. Created using such techniques as engraving, aquatint, lithography, and photogravure, these subjects and designs were easily duplicated, and copies circulated widely. Publishers regularly edited, amended, or simply reprinted them in publications as varied as atlases, memoirs, and histories. The spread of these images led to broader knowledge and interest in Indian culture—but also to the creation and proliferation of negative stereotypes.

The fifty artworks in Strange and Wondrous, from the encyclopedic Robert J. Del Bontà collection, show how certain ascetics and Hindu practices became emblems for all that Europeans and Americans found exotic, repulsive, or remarkable in India. By tracing how these images were interpreted and reproduced over time, the exhibition also demonstrates how perceptions of Indian culture shifted from the Enlightenment to the colonial period, and into modernity. Together these prints reveal structures of the European and American imagination as much as they encapsulate conceptions of India.

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